Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

This is not to make a general claim that under Nazism science had political dimensions usually absent under other political regimes. We now have more than enough studies that prove that there were political elements involved in doing science in liberal democracies or under communist dictatorships. The point here is to emphasize the particular politics associated with Nazism that phytopathology work contributed to. Research at the BRA constitutes a part of the larger story of expanding the Nazi infrastructure through the German territory, of trying to establish stronger ties between the population and the national soil, and of guaranteeing the “nutritional freedom” of the Volk and thus its biological survival, as repeated by Nazi ideology. The BRA standards made this ideology something more than just propaganda good for eloquent sentences in peasant festivals, contributing to the development of Nazism as a regime. Potatoes may seem mundane in comparison with rockets, nuclear reactors, autobahns, or experiments with humans. Nevertheless, they proved to be significant historical subjects to understand the Nazi regime at work.

4 Pigs: The Bodenständig Scientific Community in Nazi Germany

Breeding and Feeding Pigs and Germans

Richard Walther Darré—the main agrarian ideologue of Nazi Germany, who popularized the motto “Blut und Boden” and who was Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942—earned his credentials in völkisch circles through essays such as “Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semitten” (“The pig as a distinguishing feature for northern peoples and Semites”).[1] In that essay, the pig was called “the leading animal” of the Germanic people. Not only did Darré argue that the sacrificial pig was a favorite among the gods of ancient Aryans; he argued that the pig’s physiological properties justified such distinguished treatment. Pigs, he noted, were not easily transported over long distances and thus were not suitable livestock for the nomadic Semites. The northern forests, home of the true Germans, provided acorns for pigs, whose high fat content helped local people to survive harsh winters. Pigs performed the distinction between agrarians and nomads—or in Nazi terms, between rooted Germans and uprooted Jews. Such considerations seem to lead to the mystical and archaic dimensions of Nazism and may suggest insoluble contradictions between Nazi ideology and modern rationality. Nevertheless, the life trajectory of Darré himself and his high esteem for the place of pigs in the German national community provide a vantage point from which to explore the entanglements between science and Nazism.

After his experience on the Western Front in World War I, which gave him the veteran status so typical of the members of fascist movements all across Europe, Darré tried to resume his studies at the Deutsche Kolonialschule in Hamburg in 1919. But only a year later, he was expelled, having been accused of lying. In 1922 he enrolled in the University of Halle to study agronomy.[2] Before the war, that university’s agricultural institute had been considered the best in all Germany. When Darré arrived there, two of its most distinguished faculty members, Theodor Roemer and Gustav Frölich, were committed to transforming plant and animal breeding into respectable academic disciplines through thorough use of Mendelian genetics.[3] Historians have already called attention to the importance of the work undertaken by Roemer at the Halle Institute of Crop Science and Plant Breeding.[4] Frölich and the Halle Institute for Animal Breeding and Dairy have received considerably less historical scrutiny, a historiographic gap that this chapter aims at filling.

^{Figure 4.1 Richard Darré speaking at a 1937 Reichsnährstand meeting in Goslar under the slogan “Blut und Boden.”}

^{(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1215–503–009 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)}

^{Figure 4.2 Gustav Frölich (1879–1940).}

^{(Zeitschrift für Schweinezucht, 47.35, 1940)}

We know that Darré attended the classes of both Frölich and Roemer at Halle, and also those of the paleontologist Johannes Walther.[5] And though it is never easy for biographers to establish what remained in college students’ heads from materials taught in lectures, there is no reason to doubt Darré’s own account of the profound effects of those three scientists on his enduring interest in everything related to heredity.[6]